Well, we've come to the end of a great week for giving 50 poor families on the Cheyenne River Reservation a full Thanksgiving Dinner. That was the goal of the women who run Okiciyap (we help)and we have almost realized their goal. They estimate that each family will feed 10 people on Thanksgiving Day, so that's 500 people with a nice, fresh, hot meal that day. With an unemployment rate of 80% in the winter, that's nothing to sneeze at folks.
If you haven't donated yet, Thanksgiving dinner costs just under $5 per person this year nationwide. So we are basically missing dinner for 50 more people.
So if 50 people each buy 1 person Thanksgiving dinner, we're there!
On Sunday, the New England Kossacks started us off by collecting $100. Thanks everyone! It was great to meet all of you.
Besides being a reality-based, data-driven community, the Daily Kos community is also characterized by compassion in action, which this project so aptly illustrates. I really appreciate that about you all, and I'm always grateful to be part of this community.
NMRed has offered to donate $1 for every Tip and Rec you give the diary. So if you're tapped out, you can donate that way!
We had figured that just the turkeys at 14 pounds per bird at $1.79 a pound, would be $1260. Well, you all donated that so quickly that we realized that we could go for the whole dinner for the families. If you've been reading these diaries you know that the food banks in the region and nationally don't have much decent food these days, so we couldn't count on the families getting the rest of the food for a complete dinners.
I am totally amazed at how fast we raised $2250 toward the goal of $2500 for the full dinner. Lets finish this up today so the women can go shopping over the weekend.
The families will have Thanksgiving dinner in their homes. Okiciyap is planning to have a Christmas dinner at the pantry (more on that after turkey day).
Here's the ChipIn.
Thank you and bless you.
For those of you whose systems don't handle flash, here is the direct link to the ChipIn.
Of course you're also welcome to send a check. If you do so, please let me know in the comments so we can keep track of how close we're coming to our goal.
You can send the checks to this address:
PO Box 172
Isabel SD 57633
One other thing....
If you can't help out now but buy your Christmas presents online, you can help Okiciyap for free by signing up for iGive. Participating stores will donate a percentage of your purchase price to the charity of your choice. No strings. You download it and a little widget sits unobtrusively in your browser, or you can just do it through their website. You will get emails when iGive generates donations for your chosen organization. They don't bug you. There are also coupons, etc.
An Update
I thought I'd update you on the pantry and food situation.
There is still mostly junk in the local food banks. This is a problem nationally, which you can find more out about in this very informative diary by Aji. Nobody knows when that situation is going to change. Luckily, Okiciyap volunteers were able to scrounge up one load of decent stuff from the local food bank. They're back to having junk food there now.
Here are some pictures from that last load.
Volunteers:
Cindy looking a lot like her sister Georgia, helping with some stuff:
Cindy's daughter Amy taking a tea break. Vice President of the pantry as a high schooler. Pretty cool.
New England Kossacks
Donation cup
We'll be posting this all week long. Lets see what we can do....
Oh and.....KOSSACKS ROCK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!